Re: actually, roaming IS the meaningless term

If what you say is true, Verizon is a useless service. It's one thing if he has a weak or diminished signal, but once he has none, his phone should find a roaming partner.

Is that the trade-off these days to be on "The Network?"

Yes, kind of...

As of 2.5 years ago when I quit working at Verizon, they still had Extended Network partnerships that were "roamable" carriers that did not bill per minute roaming charges.

However, the handsets themselves are programmed to reject signals from non-partner towers (anywhere inside the USA) and just refuse to function on what once-would-have-been a pay per minute roaming tower. The handset will still dial 911 in these non-partner areas, but will do nothing else.

Part of the problem with the debate here is that the term "Roaming" has two definitions, strictly speaking. From a "hardware" perspective, roaming is any time you make a call while outside the home area that your 10-digit phone number was originally assigned to assigned to. a California customer travelling in New York is ALWAYS roaming, under this definition, even though he isn't billed extra, because the plan has national coverage.

The "billing" definition of roaming is completely different, roaming is when you get billed per minute for leaving your service area.

It was always a hassle trying to explain that nuance to customers, but I did it better than most.